Free Fallout by Sadie Jones Page B

habit in Seston, a town too small to dominate the sky, looked for stars but saw only the glow of the city’s lights diffused.
    ‘Pub?’ said Paul and Luke nodded. ‘The Hansom Cab, up the road.’
    ‘Brilliant,’ Luke said and nodded.
    And the people all moved out into the night.
     
    The pub was seething with locals and the sudden influx of Friday-night crowd. Twenty minutes to last orders, a rush on the bar. Luke, trying not to trip people up with his holdalls and record player, glimpsed the bottles on the far wall gleaming in the false Victorian lamplight, flock wall-paper behind them like a jungle. It was a moment before he realised Paul was not with him, but still outside on the pavement, with a cigarette in his mouth and his hands shoved deeply into his pockets. Luke hovered on the edge of the crowd.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Sod it, let’s go back to mine.’
    So he joined Paul on the pavement, London girls and city noise denied him.
    ‘There’s no sodding point,’ said Paul.
    He began to walk and Luke followed, while inside, crushed up against the bar, Nina, drinking a gin and tonic, kept her back to Jeremy Elton and took comfort in the fact that she had perfected, over time, a mask. Hardly anybody ever knew what she was feeling. She fended off Tad’s after-show euphoric flirtation and endured Chrissie’s wide-eyed surprise at having not one but three agents interested in signing her. As the high relief of coming off stage drained she felt only disappointment with herself. She looked around what seemed to her the uniformly bright and sure faces of her classmates and felt her own talent, her will, too weak and uncertain. It was Chrissie who had won the prize that night, not she.
    ‘I think you’re the sexiest old lady in London,’ said Tad in a cod Russian accent, breathing beerily into her face. ‘Won’t you lift up your apron and let me see your samovar?’
    Nina laughed, matching his accent.
    ‘I’ll show you my samovar if you take me to Moscow,’ she said, ‘and buy me a drink.’
     
    Paul didn’t speak during the short walk back to his flat and trudged morosely up the stairs ahead of Luke, who kept silent, an unwelcome guest weighed down by bags, trying not to think about what he would do if he were thrown out. Inside, Paul slammed the door behind them both, swiped at the switch and the room was flooded with light so bright it seemed to ring. He fetched a bottle of whisky from the fake-wooden sideboard and held it up.
    ‘Thanks,’ said Luke and Paul fetched two tumblers from the kitchen.
    He sloshed the whisky into them, cigarette in mouth, and handed one to Luke, going over to stare out of the window into the street below. Luke held his full glass and winced and fidgeted and wondered what to do. His bags were heaped like a pair of bulging corpses in the middle of the room, the record player leaning damply against them.
    Without turning, Paul barked, ‘What did you think of the play?’
    Luke hadn’t moved or taken off his coat and was just holding his glass of whisky like a prop.
    ‘I imagined them real when I read it,’ he said, quickly, ‘but two of them were like schoolgirls, and I thought it was sad. The words have everything. Masha was the best of them. That redhead just did a face.’
    Paul turned round to face him.
    ‘I don’t know what I’m sodding doing,’ he said.
    ‘Right,’ said Luke, nonplussed.
    ‘I don’t want to be an engineer. I’m an engineer. I want to be a –’ he stumbled, ‘– producer . . . but I don’t do bloody anything except go to the theatre and read and ring people up and not get rung back and I haven’t a blind sodding clue what to do about it. I hate my job. I’ll be twenty-three in a month! I spent all my money from my dad on this flat and now I don’t have anything else to get started and—’ He stopped and drained his whisky. Luke had the impression he wasn’t normally a drinker. It was a lot of whisky all for one time and afterwards he