Max had not seen Kate since the party at Latimer Crescent. He’d hardly seen her on the night of the party either, and he couldn’t remember how much of a state he’d been in. He had a suspicion that he’d abandoned her, as he had a habit of doing when he was a bit too pissed. He knew she’d slept in his bed because the pillow was indented and the cover pulled back when he woke in the morning. She’d left already, William said when at last Max made it downstairs. Max wasn’t quite sure how, but he knew that at some point he had ended up at the bottom of the garden, climbing up onto the trampoline—the pride of his teenage years but now long neglected—where Nicole and her friend Elias were doing lines. Max rolled onto the canvas, which bounced, and Nicole and Elias both turned and shouted at him to be still.
“You know this thing is basically a sieve,” Max said, sliding on his belly toward them so as not to disturb the pile of powder Elias was gathering. “Watcha doing there, sis?”
“My birthday present,” Nicole said, watching Elias beadily.
“You want one?” Elias said.
“Elias,” Nicole said, “that’s my baby brother.”
Elias waved his hand without looking up. “I won’t make him pay,” he said.
“Maxie doesn’t do drugs,” Nicole said, pinching him hard on the cheek, “do you?”
“Yes please,” said Max, batting Nicole’s hand away.
Max had done purer coke than this, and the bump Elias gave him was more like a shot of espresso than the buzz he’d been after. Elias, who had been watching him for a reaction, appeared to be impressed by his lack of one, and lined up another. Max stayed on the trampoline with Elias for a while after Nicole had gone back to the party. Elias had been at university with Nicole, but he’d been living abroad, on and off, for the last few years and had only just returned.
“You should have come to see me,” Elias said when Max told him he’d been studying in Colombia a year and a half ago. “I was living in Rio then.”
“I’ve been wanting to go back to Latin America for ages. I tried to persuade Kate—”
“Kate?” Elias flicked the dead ash at the end of his cigarette onto the trampoline.
“My friend. She’s here, somewhere.”
“Why doesn’t she want to go?”
Max shrugged. “Money.”
“Go on your own, then.”
That night Elias had stayed in one of the spare rooms and had hung around for most of the next day after everybody else had gone. They ate brunch out in the sunshine, and after Nicole had gone to nap, Elias went to find some beers for him and Max. Later in the day, William came out to sit with them, but he didn’t take his glasses off and hardly spoke, soon returning inside and shutting himself in his office.
“Did Nicole tell you what’s going on with our uncle?” Max said to Elias. He wasn’t sure if he needed to excuse his father’s mood or to elicit sympathy for it. Elias was wearing sunglasses; it was hard to make out his expression.
“No,” he said. “What is going on?”
Max shook his head. “Family shit.” They sat in silence for a while before Elias spoke again.
“You know what we should do. Tonight. We should go to the Royal China Club. The duck is fucking incredible—better than you get in Shanghai. I know a guy so we won’t have to queue.”
Max started spending more time with Elias, and they would meet in Moorgate when Elias finished work, standing on the pavement outside crowded bars drinking cold beer and smoking. The day he was supposed to move in with Kate, Max had been on his way from the new flat to Latimer Crescent when Elias had phoned, asking what time he was free.
“I can’t,” Max said. “I haven’t even starting packing.”
“Just one,” Elias said.
It had got to ten P.M. before they agreed it was time to schedule a hiatus from drinking and to eat something. Elias negotiated them the best table by the window of a vegetarian curry house and, without looking at the menu, asked for a lamb biryani.
“Or chicken,” he said, batting away the menu the waiter tried to hand to him, “chicken is fine if you can’t do lamb.”
“This is a vegetarian restaurant, sir,” the waiter explained patiently.
“Oh, yes,” said Elias, with the grace of a self-proclaimed prodigy explaining to his teacher that two plus two equals five, “but I said I would have chicken.”
Max, sensing that Elias was not quite in control of the situation, took the menu from him and leaned blearily toward it.
“Paneer,” he said, moments before his nose collided with the card, “we’ll have it with paneer.”
“This is gonna be you and me,” Elias said, as the waiter took the menu away. “When we’re rich. Dining out every night on Embers.”
Max frowned. “Dining on Embers?”
“You’ve got to start owning this, Max; your idea,” Elias said. He filled up Max’s water glass, sending ice cubes tumbling from the jug and skittering across the wooden tabletop. Neither man was aware how loudly he was speaking, nor of how quiet the rest of the restaurant was.
“Oh, yeah,” Max said, and then: “What idea?”
Elias leaned across the table toward Max, and said, again, in a dramatic whisper: “Embers. Tinder, but for the over-sixties. The pensioners’ dating app of choice. Geriatric romance. It’s fucking inspired.” Elias brought his fist down emphatically, crashing through the pile of popadams that had been placed between them, and paused to belch softly. “But if you don’t own it, I can tell you right now, someone else will.”
“Yeah, right.” Max was too drunk to recall whether this had been his terrible business idea or an ingenious joke, but seemingly Elias thought it could be both. “I can’t code, though,” he said.
“I can code, Max. I’d love to code this. I’m gonna learn to code. Let’s fucking do this—you’re the idea, and the money, and I’ll be the executor.” Elias closed his eyes and inhaled slowly, savoring his ingenuity. “Fuck,” he said.
Max’s mouth and hands took the initiative at that point and disregarded the pleas of his brain and stomach, ordering a bottle of the most expensive wine to mark the beginning of their new venture.
After the second bottle, things began to get a little confused, and his memory of what happened once they left the curry house was blurry. It was not at all unlikely that he had knocked a drink from the hands of the Goliath figure standing next to him in the Soho bar that he and Elias had stumbled into. Such was his excitement that, instead of apologizing, it was also entirely possible that he had attempted to proposition Goliath as a potential investor in his new business.
“Embers,” Max slurred, slapping his hand on the man’s upper arm with an unexpectedly dull thud. “Whaddya say?”
“I’d say you’ve ruined my fucking shirt, mate,” Goliath said. “This is dry-clean only.”
“Mate, mate,” said Max, smiling benevolently and spreading his arms wide, “it’s embers under the bridge.”
Elias later told Max that in fact it had been not Goliath but the doorman who had delivered the hefty shove that had sent him crashing out the back door of the bar, his head slamming limply into the brick wall on the opposite side of the alleyway. Elias, who had called an ambulance and had then canceled it when the operator refused to guarantee that the driver would be willing to drop Elias at a private address before taking his friend to the hospital, booked a taxi for them both instead.
It was past one when Max got back to the flat. When at last he had remembered the number of the building, he put a deep scratch with his key in the freshly painted door as he was trying to unlock it, before stumbling inside. Because he went straight to his room and passed out on his mattress, he didn’t see that Kate was asleep on the sofa.