Kite lifted her towards him. He was amazed by her weightlessness in the water; it was the first time he had ever held a woman in such a way.
‘You feeling a bit better?’ he asked.
She scrunched up her face.
‘Still annoyed,’ she said. ‘So sad to lose those pictures. Your breath stinks of whisky.’
‘Have some then,’ said Kite, and got out of the pool to grab the Johnnie Walker. They stood in the water up to their waists drinking from the bottle as the rain ran down their faces and bounced on the tiles around the pool. Later they slipped back into the house and went to Martha’s bedroom. Only when she was asleep, almost three hours later, did Kite head back to his own room. Xavier’s light was still on and his door ajar, so he knocked quietly and went inside.
His friend had fallen asleep in his clothes. A bottle of Smirnoff had tipped over beside him, soaking an old Turkish rug and a copy of the Herald Tribune. A cigarette had burned down to the filter in his hand. Kite took the cigarette and threw it in the bin. The smell of alcohol on Xavier’s breath was the smell of his father, passed out in the living room when Kite was still a child. The vodka bottle was half-empty. He prised it from Xavier’s grasp, screwed on the cap and put it on the bedside table. Kite then pulled his groaning, mumbling friend out of his clothes, lifted him in his boxer shorts onto the bed and covered him with a sheet. He thought of his mother, of all the nights when she had put Paddy to bed in this way, the unutterable sadness and fury of dealing with a drunk.
Wrapping the newspaper and the bottle of vodka inside the rug, Kite opened the door and carried it back to his room, moving as quietly as he could. Abbas’s door was open, but he was not inside. The sun was rising, the dawn perfectly still. Kite closed his bedroom door, stuffed the rug in the cupboard and set the alarm for nine. Knowing that he would be groggy when he woke up, he retrieved the rolls of film and the Walkman cassette from his chest of drawers, put them inside his running shoes and sat on the bed.
This is what happens to the people closest to me, he thought. They become alcoholics. He had been so distracted by his work for BOX 88 that he had not even stopped to notice that his closest friend was slipping deeper and deeper into addiction, drinking quantities of alcohol at eighteen that his father had drunk as a grown man of thirty-five. It felt like a double betrayal: not only to spy in Xavier’s home, but to ignore his descent into misery.
Try as he might, Kite could not sleep. He lay on the bed, his mind turning over, until at last the clock ticked past eight o’clock and he knew that there was no time left to rest. Having showered and changed into his running gear, he put the rolls of film in the pockets of his shorts, then wearily slipped the cassette in his Walkman and looped the headphones around his neck like a noose.
Luc was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs.
49
‘Lockie!’
Xavier’s father was wearing trainers, a pair of khaki shorts, a McEnroe headband and a plain white T-shirt. He looked like a man playing a role for his own private amusement. There was something profoundly unsettling at the sight of him.
‘Thought I would join you on your morning run.’ He tapped his stomach. ‘Rosamund says that with all this food and no exercise, I am developing a beer belly. Is that correct? Is that what you call it?’
‘A beer belly, yes,’ Kite replied. It was clearly a lie. Xavier’s father kept himself in exceptional physical condition and was probably fitter than half the boys at Alford. ‘But you look well. You’ve been swimming a lot, working in the garden.’
Kite needed to persuade Luc out of joining him on the run; if he came, it would be impossible to visit Peele. But it was a forlorn hope: Luc was changed and ready, hopping up and down in the hall like a football player waiting in the tunnel before a big game. He knew something about Kite’s hidden life. It was obvious. There was a constant glimmer of suspicion in his cheery gaze.
‘So how far do we go?’ he asked.
Kite had never been further than half a mile. He knew nothing of the surrounding countryside, no route around the hills.
‘I usually just keep going until I get tired,’ he said, moving towards the front door. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Abbas in the kitchen. He was eating breakfast, staring at them, listening to every word. ‘Do you do much jogging back in London?’
‘Sometimes in Paris,’ Luc replied. Kite had a mental image of Luc running through the Bois de Boulogne alongside a pig-tailed, giggling mistress half his age. ‘So let’s go!’
Kite said that there was now no point in taking his Walkman. He went back to his room, threw it on the bed, put the roll of film in the drawer and returned to the hall. He did not know when, if ever, he would have the chance to get the film to BOX. Meanwhile, Luc was outside, doing squat thrusts beneath the lime tree. The idea of going through the motions of a forty-minute run, of passing the safe house and not being able to go in, was not just frustrating; it felt to Kite as though he was being led into a trap. He wished that he could turn round and go back upstairs, but desperately wanted to know what had motivated Luc to accompany him on his run.
‘OK, let’s go!’ he said, as if Kite was a personal trainer and he was paying him by the hour. ‘You lead
