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It's the end of the holiday. So when the two men point at the sun beds next to mine and ask if they're free, I’m more prepared than I was on my first day, when another, different man had waded over to the spot where I'd propped myself up on the side of the pool, and asked what I was reading.
'Oh. It’s...a fiction...book.' I'd said, unsure whether 'it's a thriller about a psychopathic killer nanny' was really the level of poolside chat he was looking for.
Then I turned back to my book - if indeed I'd even turned to him in the first place, which I doubt I had - and left him awkwardly sitting a metre or so away from me in the hot Nevada sun mumbling 'oh, cool!' before falling silent. Which is really the only thing you can do when someone both responds and doesn't respond to a question you probably didn't really want to know the answer to in the first place.
But that was day one, and this was day six. Things were different now. I was leaving for the airport in half an hour, which significantly diminished any low level anxiety about how I'd eventually remove myself from the conversation when it got boring, or the lengths I'd need to go to avoid bumping into them at the pool the next day. I was more relaxed, more au fait with the place, more full of the sensei-like wisdom you're always ready to offer, entirely unprompted, to any new guest you meet on holiday when you've been there longer than a few days.
So I said, 'Sure, those beds are free, go for it', and they lay down, and then one of them started to talk.
On day one, the Londoner in me would have recoiled at the idea of talking to a complete stranger, but by day six I knew what happened in Vegas. And what happens in Vegas is that men approach you, and start conversations, and are often very polite, and complimentary, and quite interesting to talk to. And the more it happened over the course of the week, the more the Londoner in me basked in the novelty of it, and forgot to mind.
So that's how we got chatting, and I found out from their accent and tattoos that these men were from Manchester. Then the conversation moved on to where I was from - which is London - and then onto the thing London is most known for - which is murder - and just as I was about to speculate on the consequences of cutting funding to inner-city youth services, his friend, who'd been mostly silent up until now, piped up with his own take.
'I've been to London a few times' he said, 'And thing is, some bits of London are just terrible. It's like being in another country. You walk around and there's barely any white people anywhere, no one who speaks any English. It's awful.'
Then he looked at me expectantly, like a man waiting for a treat.
Oh good, a racist! I thought, imagining how terrible it would be if someone were to find this man's worldly possessions, buy some matches, and burn them to the ground while he was away.
'Well,' I replied, 'I actually think that's the best bit about London. Having lots of people from different cultures and backgrounds living around each other is what makes London really good.'
At this, his mouth formed a line, which I took as a sign to continue. 'Like, how boring would the world be if everyone looked and sounded and did everything exactly the same as you? If everyone was from the same place? I can't imagine anything worse. It'd just be a bit bloody dull.'
And with one final awkward silence marking the end of another successful stranger-conversation, I wished them a lovely holiday. Then I got on a plane destined for south east England's favourite multicultural hellscape, and went home.
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