Читать книгу Idiopathy - Sam Byers, Sam Byers - Страница 7

Daniel was in bed when he got Katherine’s message. He had been there for three days, suffering from a crippling bout of what Angelica had diagnosed, rather unsympathetically, as Dan-Flu.

Daniel had always been stoically healthy. Recently, however, he had developed an odd relationship with illness. He spent quite protracted periods of time believing he was becoming unwell.

‘I think I’m coming down with something,’ he’d say, making vague gestures at his throat or nose, his presentation largely asymptomatic. ‘I’ve got a funny … you know … like a sort of …’

‘Like a sort of hypochondria?’ Angelica would inevitably say. ‘Like a sort of deluded-type feeling?’

‘No. Like a sensation, a sort of sensation in my throat. I think there’s something going round.’

On the verge of succumbing as he so often claimed to be, it was surprising how infrequently Daniel tipped the scales into observable disease. His relationship with illness was flirtatious; only a particularly attractive ailment could tempt him into bed. When it did, he reacted with all the high-flown sense of occasion one might expect from a man who was constantly yearning-and-putting-off.

‘No, no,’ he’d say, huffing another fistful of snot into a tissue and tossing the resultant goopy wad onto the heap of others he kept as a quantitative record of his malaise, ‘it’s definitely not a cold. Because my stomach feels weird and that suggests to me that it’s more …’

He wondered what had become of him. In all the time he’d been with Katherine he’d been ill once, twice at most, and even then with great reluctance. He’d prided himself on his resilience. At his previous place of work he’d kept a copy of Field Marshal Montgomery’s famous sign on his desk: I’m 99% Fit, Are You? Odd, really, given how generally diseased his entire relationship with Katherine had been. Perhaps, he thought, you never really shut disease out; merely shunted it into new areas of your life.

On this occasion, Daniel had succumbed to something that wasn’t quite flu, since it was accompanied by a level of fatigue and lower back pain that were not, in Daniel’s conception of flu, a normal part of the experience. Responding with his usual immediacy as soon as it became clear this was going to be a genuine bout of ill health, he’d taken to his bed and remained there for close to seventy-two hours, getting up only sporadically for such necessities as toast, orange juice and trips to the toilet. By day three he was in a satisfying funk. The bed reeked; he was greasy and unshaven; his dressing gown had become a grim second skin.

Disappointingly, despite these heavily vaunted external indicators, Daniel also seemed to be showing every sign of recovery, and the thought was beginning to occur to him that the thing might have run its course, and that he should probably start thinking about getting up and making himself halfway human again before Angelica got genuinely impatient and frustrated rather than just teasingly so. Given that he and Angelica had invited friends round for dinner (or, more accurately, Angelica had invited her friends round for dinner), he was under a certain degree of pressure to recover, and much as he resented this, it seemed preferable to an evening spent listening to their echoing laughter downstairs.

Daniel liked being ill. He regarded it as luxurious, almost decadent. He spent so much of his life being organised and well presented that he had come to regard illness as one of the few times he had permission to let himself go. He drank only occasionally, and although he had experimented with drugs in the past, largely supervised by Nathan, whose capacity for illegal intake was boundless and troubling and, to Daniel, faintly seductive, he had never really been the type to develop any regular habits of chemical relaxation. Indeed, the only time he was ever particularly tempted was when Angelica, as she often did, announced that she didn’t need drugs to have a good time, prompting Daniel to wonder if he might need drugs to have a good time around people who didn’t need drugs to have a good time.

His convalescence had not, however, gone according to plan, and it was this precise sense of missed opportunity that now led him to resent his forced return to the land of the well. One of the great things about being ill, or so he’d always thought, was that it was one of the few times he could justifiably escape interaction. He liked to take to his bed, turn off the phone, and lie prone for as long as it took to feel human. This time, however, Angelica had been home for the first two days, and much as he respected her offers of hugs and food and ‘company’, none of them were really what he wanted. This morning she had gone out, and he had looked forward to spending at least a small portion of his alone-time masturbating to the collection of low-grade pornography he kept in a locked file marked ‘work’ on his laptop. His aim was predominantly medicinal. Daniel took scant pleasure in masturbation these days, but had become concerned about the quality of his sperm, as if his increasingly staid existence might be directly affecting the efficiency and productivity of his testes. He imagined the little beasts in their gloopy pool, wet-brained and lame, swim-limping around in impotent circles. Was it possible to have depressed sperm? If so, how could you tell? When he finished he made sure to study the mess on the tissue, the bedspread, the old T-shirt, for signs of dubious consistency or colouration. It always looked much the same, but recently he could have sworn that it had lost some of its sheen.

As if aware of his intentions, however, Angelica had placed the cat on the bed before she left (her cat: Giggles, a vast, slovenly sand-bag of a beast, with matted fur and a gammy eye). Mistaking his dancing fist under the bedcover for some form of prey, Giggles had taken to leaping on Daniel’s genitals every three or four strokes, rendering him, after about ten futile minutes, incapable of anything even approaching pleasure, so terrified was he that, if he did achieve orgasm, it would be forever linked in his mind to the feeling of an obese cat pogoing around on his penis, thus possibly triggering some sort of latent and horribly embarrassing fetish.

A frustrating day, then, made all the more disturbing by the sight, about twenty minutes after Angelica returned home, of his mobile phone vibrating and Katherine’s name scrolling gently across the screen.

If it is possible to miss someone while simultaneously hoping you never have to see them again, then this is how Daniel felt about Katherine. He’d softened over time, of course, and in the end nostalgia had just about won out over revulsion, but it was touch and go. A kind of tender nausea, was how he thought of it; a wistful horror.

He listened to her message twice, sitting on the edge of the bed, half out of his dressing gown. He felt ragged and poorly put together. He lacked, suddenly, the energy and willingness to get up and change.

Angelica called from downstairs, her voice like full beams through fog, ‘Daniel? Are you coming? It’s ready, baby. But you’ve got to be honest, OK?’

He played the message again, trying to read Katherine’s voice, flat-toned, business-like – her voice for getting things done. Was that a flutter he could detect? A tension? Did it fall a little at the end? Did her message seem hurried, as if she just wanted to get through it? As always with Katherine, he hoped for more than he received, and the fact that he still, after all this time of learning to know better, hoped at all, was itself a source of both irritation and sadness.

‘I’m coming,’ he said, his voice hoarse, his sinuses ballooning under the pressure of speech. It sounded like he’d said, ‘I’b cubbig.’

He wondered if he should call her right away. Perhaps, he thought, he should leave it a few days, or call at the weekend, when he was more likely to find her at home, and when he was more likely to be able to hold a sensible conversation.

He fingered the tassels on the edge of the bedspread – one of those airbrushed cosmic designs that cram the infinite expanse of the planetary realm into the domestic confines of a mass-produced double bed. It was laughable, really. So much was laughable. In the corner of the bedroom was a large canvas where Angelica had expressed herself through the medium of Infant Art – capital I, capital A. One of her therapists had told her to paint with the innocence of a child. Angelica had finger-painted a sun and blue sky, except that her thumb had smudged the acrylic so that the sun’s rays turned green at the tips. It was endearing and awful. He listened to the message a final time and found he could read even less into it than before.

‘Honey? I said it’s ready. Are you coming down? They’re going to be here any minute and I’d really love it if you could …’

‘I said I’m coming.’

He remembered Nathan the last time he’d seen him, standing under the summer stars in a forest clearing, naked from the waist up, standing perfectly still while a throbbing press of dancers ululated around him. He’d seemed somehow beyond it all, beyond time. Where had he been the past year and a half?

Daniel found some jeans on the end of the bed and half-heartedly pushed his feet through the legs. He wanted to get back into bed and sleep. He wondered if he should tell Angelica about the message and then realised, with a little drop somewhere in his small intestine, that he wasn’t really wondering at all, merely pretending to himself that he was wondering. This was something he was capable of. He could go through the motions of decency in order to soften the inevitable indecency at the end. Whatever your moral fibre, as Katherine had always been fond of explaining, convenience trumped ethical resolve every time. Why else would God have invented remorse?

‘What are you doing up there?’

‘Nothing, honey, I’m just …’ He swept his thumb across the screen of his phone, clearing a moist print. ‘Just changing, that’s all.’

Downstairs, he found Angelica swaddled in oven gloves, bearing aloft a glass baking dish filled with what looked like lentil cement.

‘Who was that on the phone?’ she said, standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, lit from behind by the halogen bulbs that spotlit the worktops, her face in shadow, her hair oddly aflame at the edges. She was holding up the food like it was some sort of offering, as if they’d have to kneel to eat it. She looked happy and precarious. He told himself she might drop the dish if he was honest.

‘No one,’ he said. ‘Wrong number.’

Angelica had been holding something delicate, he thought – it would have been incautious to tell her. But then, Daniel considered all disclosure incautious, and as long as he’d known her, there had never been a time when Angelica, metaphorically speaking, wasn’t bearing something delicate, something she was holding out to him like a fragile sacrifice, and even when she wasn’t, there had never been a time when Daniel had struggled to imagine she was. And anyway, there was always something going round and Daniel was always coming down with something, or always feeling that next week he’d be less tired, less resentful, stronger, happier. But he never was. There was never, in so many ways, a good time.

When Daniel was six years old, his father took him to the office for the morning. There was, his father explained, no choice. Daniel had been up all night with an earache and couldn’t go to school. Daniel’s mother was away visiting her sister. Would he rather stay home alone?

It was a manipulative question. Daniel, at around the age of four, had developed a morbid fear of solitude. He woke in the night screaming, convinced he’d been abandoned or that his parents had died in their sleep. Later, some years after the trip to the office, when his mother announced, with what appeared at the time to be no warning at all, that she was leaving to go and live with a man she’d known exactly four months and two weeks (this could be calculated because the man in question was a friend of a friend and Daniel had been with his mother when she was first introduced to him, and years later could look back and diagnose the flutter in her voice and the suddenly-odd tone not just of her speech but seemingly of her whole stance and way of being), Daniel would wake in the night even more often, his heart hurling itself against the bony bars of its cage, convinced he was alone. Through his life this dream would morph into different scenes and settings, but it would always be characterised by a sense of loss that would, over time, infect his daily sense of being and inform his reactions to seemingly mundane events.

It had already been an odd few days. Daniel was unused to spending protracted periods of time alone with his father, who was usually either working late or working at home. He was older than the other parents Daniel knew, and so seemed more adult than even an average adult. There was that little bit less youth in him, and so Daniel’s understanding of him was that fraction more shallow. He had the beginnings of grey, but was a fit and active man who extolled the virtues of sport and good food, leading the young Daniel to anticipate that the four days they were to spend together (Daniel had no siblings. As his mother had once put it, last chances tend not to come in pairs) would be dull at best and possibly, at worst, quasi-military. As it turned out, he was wrong. Left to his own devices, Daniel’s father revealed himself to be a surprisingly relaxed and friendly companion. For the time Daniel’s mother was away, he didn’t work at home, but instead passed the time with Daniel, watching television and teaching him to play chess. He cooked: curries, a shepherd’s pie and, on the last night, fish and chips. Daniel would, through the years, regularly look back on these few days he’d spent in his father’s company. Before his mother left, he regarded them simply as a sort of holiday, a private island in the wide, blank expanse of his relationship with his father. After her departure, however, they took on a darker tint, and the idea formed in Daniel’s head that these days had been so pleasant not because his father was making an effort, but because he was happy, and had been able to relax to a degree that, for whatever reason, had become impossible in the company of Daniel’s mother, giving Daniel, unconsciously at the time, more consciously later, a sense of pain at the idea of curtailed masculinity; of domesticity as a vacuum of individuality. They were alone again after she left, of course, but it was different then. Daniel was older and entering the phase of his life where he sought distance, not comfort, from his parents. In the years that followed, he had cause not only to regret the manner in which the time after his mother’s departure had played out, but also to become firmer in his opinion that youth was overrated, characterised as it was by selfishness and awkwardness and a fascination with trivia. Of course, this meant in turn that, just as those later days with his father became tinged, in retrospect, with regret, so those brief days at the age of six when his father seemed to be all things at once – parent, friend and work-mate – became so much more important than they’d seemed at the time, imbued with a perfection and wider meaning to which they could never live up and which nothing could match or surpass, and at their shiny core was that day in the office, the beginning of Daniel’s working life, and his only glimpse of his father as a man in his own right.

This was ’85 – the boom years. Already a little too old by then to be at the bleeding edge of financial gain (Daniel’s father was a strong and loyal worker, but lacked the killer instinct and moral flexibility required to shift what his colleagues referred to as ‘major units’ in the city), Daniel’s father occupied a contented middle-management position in a small sales firm specialising in property deals. It was the beginning of what Daniel would later come to think of as MacGuffin jobs, or jobs in which the supposed thrust of the company or the realm in which they traded had little impact on the work of whole teams of employees who worked at deeper, more hypothetical levels. It was the detachment of work from product, of production from physical activity, and Daniel’s father was the perfect example in that, when asked, he described himself as working in property, and indeed had a job title with the word property in it, but in fact had no recourse whatsoever to go near any property or even any deals relating to property. Daniel’s father worked in an analytical department charged with the task of crunching whatever numbers had been deemed important by the upper echelons. He studied trends, was the upshot, and designed graphs that helped other people understand those trends. As Daniel’s father regularly complained, most people didn’t do numbers, so if you could get the numbers into a picture you were winning. Daniel’s mother described the job as ‘boring’, the implication being that a boring job was perfect for a boring man, and although Daniel’s father clearly saw it differently, he never said as much, choosing instead to shrug his shoulders in an each-to-their-own sort of way and imply, as he would later express it to Daniel when they’d waited over an hour to see a consultant, that boredom was in the brain of the beholder.

Within a few days of spending the morning at work with his father, Daniel had completely forgotten the subject of that morning’s meeting. What he remembered were the details – the objects that had made the experience real, and the way the whole place felt so much more liberated than he had been led to believe. Up to this point, all he’d seen of his father’s working life was the dapper, buttoned-down man who left promptly each morning carrying a smart black briefcase. It turned out, however, that Daniel’s father dressed for the journey, not for the destination, and the moment he stepped into the wide, open-spaced third-floor office with its high, thick windows and carpeted, double-glazed hush that only served to further offset the beeps and trills of the machines, he stripped off his jacket, loosened his tie, rolled up his sleeves and made a cup of tea. The briefcase went under his desk, which was infinitely more untidy than Daniel had expected, and was not seen again until Daniel’s father had re-dressed for the drive home. There were personalised mugs and name plates on the desks, and huge, boxy computers with green text on black screens that seemed, at the time, to be a new world of technological advancement, spitting chains of numbers onto reams of punched paper that went on for yards. There was stationery – not just pens and pencils but bottles of Tipp-Ex and Sellotape in special dispensers and electric pencil sharpeners and fat black clips holding stacks of pale green printouts. People had photographs in little stands on their desks. Every desk was an island, unlike at school where you just sat anywhere because everywhere was the same. It was a first-name place. Everyone talked idly not just about work but about anything, about football and the traffic and tax. Daniel’s father was a different man. He was relaxed and respected. People came to him with sheaves of paper and he scribbled on them with a fat blue pen and said things like ‘well done’ or ‘nice job’. In the meeting, there was a flip chart and more pens and a series of graphs that everyone agreed were ‘good but not great’ and which Daniel’s father later confided, while driving home, had been ‘pretty awful’ but apparently everyone was keen to keep a good spin on things. Daniel’s earache faded. They gave him things to do – papers to carry. His father called him his personal assistant and introduced him to people as his new employee. The office smelled of Savlon and sweat and coffee. Everyone had a place and a function. You couldn’t be left out because you had a job to do, a role, and everything worked because everyone worked to make it work, and on the drive home when Daniel told his father he wanted to work in an office, Daniel’s father’s smile was the sort of glimpse of themselves people give you maybe once or twice in their life, and it struck Daniel, not then but later, that the whole morning had been Daniel’s father smiling at him, and every office after that morning, no matter how blank or fractious or grim, was a part of that smile, and a part of Daniel, even then, seemed to know that this was going to be a difficult thing to explain and so kept quiet until a rain-drenched morning roughly twenty-four years later when he let himself into his father’s house and found the old man at the dining table, surrounded by all the old objects, sorting scraps of magazine into bundles clamped with bulldog clips and scribbling across their faces with a marker before ordering the sheaves into stacks and keeping some sort of list on the back of an envelope that turned out to be a letter from Daniel’s mother from before they were married. His father looked up with that same jovial smile and said he was terribly sorry but he was just absolutely snowed under today what with this audit and could they possibly re-schedule for tomorrow and he realised, Daniel did, the awful importance of work in our chains of being; the need for it, the yearning for it when it’s gone, and the way all those rhythms and patterns of production hang so much deeper inside us than so many other facets which, when faced with the choice between remembering and forgetting, would seem to be so much more important. His father was going to forget who his son was. He was going to forget that day in the office and the hours Daniel had spent as his assistant, and was going to become unaware even of the time they were spending together now, and the ways in which Daniel was once again playing at being his aide. All his love and hopes and achievements and the shitty fears and prejudices that made him who he was were going to die, but the details of the office – the reams of paper and the left-to-right flow of in-tray and out-tray and the fucking bulldog clips – would all be remembered, stored in pockets of muscle and nerve until the day he died, and after that Daniel found the office a seriously difficult place to be, not only because there was something about it that now seemed toxic, but because he was no longer sure he could fill what had become a cavernous conceptual space. With his father still present, Daniel had been his father’s boy at the office, living up to something, becoming something. With his father now absent (not dementia, the specialist had said, but a cerebrovascular accident, a fender-bender somewhere in the looping, semi-liquid curls of his brain), Daniel was once again the little boy trapped in little boy-hood, paddling around in his father’s outsized shoes and billowing jacket, picking up the phone and holding a profoundly important conversation with the dial tone. He woke in the night and felt forgotten. He lay beside Angelica and felt only the confines of their intimacy. She couldn’t sleep without touching him, it seemed, and he couldn’t sleep when he was touched. He waited until she started snoring and then slid his hand from hers or rolled out from under her embrace. She stalked him across the bed – rolling this way and that; finding his arm and pulling it over her shoulders with a deep-breathed Mmmmm that spoke of both contentment and gentle reproach. But he needed to dream alone, and the very fact of her contact seemed to interrupt a circuit somewhere in his mind and served, if not to wake him, then at least to bring his dreams to a saddening and premature closure, so that he awoke, always, to a sense of incompleteness – the disappointment of started dreams.

He adjusted his body clock to optimise his respite. He had, on several carefully spaced evenings, gone to bed before Angelica and then feigned sleep when she followed him. He liked to vary the presentation. One night he was simply asleep, another he gave the appearance of having drifted off with a book on his chest. He’d pictured, as he carefully positioned himself on his back with the book spread over his chest, Angelica smiling to herself as she reached out and removed the book and then turned out the light before sliding into the bed beside him. In reality, though, she had simply ignored him, and Daniel had found himself trapped beneath the book, unsure if he should pretend to wake and make himself more comfortable or simply maintain the lie and remain as he was. He’d chosen the latter, spending half the night pinned and tense and unable either to sleep or to roll over.

He had, for a time, experimented with rising early and doing his dreaming while awake, staring out at the suburban dawn with its little tiles of domestic light, watching the gathering mosaic of parted curtains and illuminated rooms as the street followed him into the day. But Angelica, alert to his movements even through her ear plugs and eye-mask, had attuned herself to his sleep cycles and begun following him downstairs after mere minutes of blissful solitude, sitting beside him as he sipped his coffee and strained for small talk. She strained with him, of course, or even for him at times. Tell me something, she’d say, folding her legs beneath her on the sofa and tucking her dressing gown over her feet. What are you thinking? He didn’t know, couldn’t say. She had a way of reaching out and gently tapping his temple – What’s going on in there? The more she pursued, the more he fled. Morning after grey morning, they sat side by side in resigned silence, each frowning slightly, shaping words they never said, until eventually she smiled and sighed and said, Isn’t it great that we can just sit together quietly like this?

So he left for work early, arriving at The Centre long before he needed to be there. He liked to walk the labs before the nine o’clock influx, pacing the brushed-glass workstations and aluminium fittings; listening to the way the instruments hummed and ticked in isolation. When there was no one else there, you could feel the laboratories breathe. He never touched anything. Much like the rest of Daniel’s life, you could have dusted for his prints and found barely a whorled smudge. He simply liked the feel of the place, the energy. Four wide rooms of quiet research and gently scrolling diagnostics, lit with the faintest tint of green. At the back was a heated bio-dome that housed a perfectly engineered cornfield. He liked to make his way through the clinical hush and then stand at the edge of the field, squinting until the clear walls and ceilings dimmed from his peripheral vision and there was nothing left but the gold expanse of the crop. In the winter, it was especially comforting, and he enjoyed the oddness of stripping off his overcoat and standing for a moment in the middle of a perfectly false summer’s day, the smell of the field wafting up at him like the very essence of summers gone by, sheltered from the rain as it lashed the arched glass roof and made a marbled, swimming mess of the sky.

Daniel was conjoined with Angelica the way two melting candles might form a single, shapeless mass of wax. She believed in a degree of closeness and intimacy that was almost mystical. She wanted them to overlap, to meld. The difficulty was that Daniel had done too good a job of painting himself in her colours. Ventriloquism had always been a knack of his. On a good day, he could even do the faces to match. He found the easiest disguise was blandness – the disguise of having no face at all. Angelica didn’t know, or could briefly sense but then optimistically disregard, the discreet territories of himself he kept in reserve. He told her he loved her. He did love her. She loved him. It was awful. Love, with all its formless cushioning and puffed-up protection, had inflated between them like an air bag in a car crash. She looked into his eyes while they made love and he imagined himself in a narrow tunnel with the weight of a river rushing above him. He would never leave her. He lived in fear of her leaving him.

Angelica was a year younger than Daniel, and several years behind in terms of her professional development, largely because she had invested large acreages of her life into what she thought of as her personal development. She’d travelled. She’d explored. She’d spent time in a number of places yet appeared, when it came down to it, to have been nowhere. Travellers always talked that way, Daniel noticed. It was designed to give the impression of nomadic flux, of freedom – a concept Angelica and her friends seemed to hold dear. To Daniel, it was an odd sort of liberty, as though their very pursuit of a limitless, weightless existence somehow constrained and burdened them. For him, freedom had always seemed more static, more solidly hewn. It was freedom from fear; the relief of no longer having to search – for a job, a partner, a house. Not for him the Goan sands and full-moon raves and Hare Krishna platitudes. Better the yearly bonus, the sense of completion that accompanied genuine quantifiable achievement. Or so he’d always thought, and tried to think still, now, as he felt himself trapped and terrified of being free.

Daniel had met Angelica, slightly predictably but with an air of what-the-hell, in a bar, on a sleety festive Thursday, at a time when he’d composed in his mind such a long and compelling list of things he didn’t want in a woman that he could be attracted only to their absence. Naturally, Angelica had her good qualities, but it was the things she lacked that drew him to her. She was the anti-Katherine. She wasn’t harsh or abrasive. She didn’t shout, she wasn’t difficult to be around and, critically, Daniel could not imagine her defecating. After Katherine, who had a sort of rolling-news approach to the workings of her body; who detailed her bowel movements over breakfast; who followed him into the bathroom while he was brushing his teeth and studied her sanitary pad like it was the morning headlines, Daniel had forsworn the vulgar physicality of women he slept with, and so gauged each woman he met against the ease with which he could imagine her shitting or menstruating. Throughout his first conversation with Angelica, then, as they stood uncomfortably close in the press of damp bar-hoppers and shouted into each other’s ears over the clatter, Daniel had tried and happily failed to demolish her beauty in his mind. His attraction to her was complex; reverse-reactive. It wasn’t that he fancied her, it was that he couldn’t imagine himself not fancying her.

Their conversation had flowed with their drinks: pleasantries over cut-price pints; intimacies over marked-up cocktails, and again Angelica had revealed herself to be everything Katherine was not in that she not only had a sense of the wider world but actually at times expressed opinions on how it could be improved. One of Katherine’s most frequent complaints about Daniel was that he was little more than an idealistic middle-class liberal with a conveniently vague grasp of reality. Part of what made Daniel so angry about this remark was that it was true, and like any liberal he wanted less to change the world than simply to be around people who wanted the world to be different in all the same ways. What a thrill, then, to hear Angelica voicing her opinions on global responsibility, rising sea levels, and whatever was going on with the cattle. It wasn’t that it was love, it was simply that it was closer to Daniel’s idea of love than anything that had come along before.

They’d spent their dating days doing good. It was a bad time for beef, even then. Up and down the country, cattle were trancing out. Farmers were finding lone members of the herd at the edges of fields staring blank and unblinking into the middle distance, starving and dehydrating to death. Experts were at a loss. The term Bovine Idiopathic Entrancement, far from a diagnosis, was coined as an admission of ignorance. Daniel and Angelica had hounded McDonald’s. On two occasions they’d taken to the streets, handing out poorly printed leaflets that spoke of the evil behind convenience. They felt they were kicking the Golden Arches while they were down. At some point, the environment had become the new Third World. Convenience was out. You had to work for your food. Anything fast was suspicious. Ease was both corrupted and corrupting.

Awful, then, that they, as a couple, were so convenient, so easy. People bought McDonald’s because they knew what they were getting. Daniel stayed with Angelica for much the same reason. She was as she’d been advertised. She did what it said on her wrapper.

For Angelica, her daily life and sense of global concern were inextricably linked. There was always room for improvement, for growth. She regarded herself (and, unfortunately, Daniel and their relationship) as something to be worked on, a project with no definable goal or conclusion. That’s something I’ve been doing a lot of work on recently, she’d say. I know I need to work on that. She read deeply and voraciously on the subject of her own shortcomings. She didn’t talk, she expressed. She didn’t think, she explored. Indeed, she appeared to have reached the conclusion that thinking itself was chancy, and possibly a symptom of some deep-seated syndrome or flaw or maladjustment that needed to be explored.

‘Do I think too much?’ she’d ask, midway through some minor domestic task. ‘Like, I feel like I’m thinking all the time, and sometimes that’s really good? But other times it’s really bad. Like it’s really paralysing, just thinking about stuff all the time.’

Daniel wasn’t sure it was possible to think too much. He often found his private thoughts considerably more interesting than day-to-day events, to the point where he sometimes resented day-to-day events for interfering with his thoughts, an issue which Angelica had raised on more than one occasion, and on which he’d begrudgingly agreed he might need to work.

‘I need to be more spontaneous,’ she’d say. ‘We both do. Let’s be really spontaneous this weekend. Let’s agree we’re going to do something totally unplanned and nuts.’

She’d said this twice. The first time they’d spent much of Saturday debating activities that might be suitably nuts, and then deciding all of them were rather predictable, at which point they’d gone shopping. The second time they’d agreed not to debate anything and each ended up making completely separate and un-discussed plans, over which they then argued for the rest of the weekend.

Their sex life was, naturally, the most symptomatic area of all. It was constantly in a state of redress. Like some grossly over-ambitious architectural project, it always seemed to be propped up with scaffolding and obstinately deviating from plans. Intimacy was an issue. Intimacy and spontaneity and the balance of the two. Sometimes, for example, Angelica got it into her head that she wanted to tantrically merge for hours on end, seeking some semi-mystical state of union she’d read about in a second-hand book. At other times, she felt the whole dimming-the-lights-and-dousing-the-room-with-incense planning of the thing made it all rather moribund and predictable, at which point she just wanted to screw and be done with it. The difficulty was that Daniel never knew, so to speak, if he was coming or going, meaning he tended to get the timing wrong and find himself accused of having either intimacy issues or some sort of problem with spontaneity and passion. As far as his personal preferences went, suffice to say his heart pretty much sank whenever he saw Angelica fumbling for a joss stick.

High-minded though they were, frugality seemed always to escape them. The things they owned seemed to breed. Domesticity, it transpired, came down to a collection of products and a desire to continually augment those products until everything was just so, which of course it never could be, because what, then, would there be to work on? Objects broke, ran out, needed cleaning (which necessitated the use of further, more specialised products). Lacking children as they did, Daniel and Angelica needed something to tend to or they risked falling into the kind of vapid complacency they both professed to fear but also secretly craved. The rough, cluttered, faintly shabby look perfected by several of their friends wasn’t an option. They needed all the same stuff as normal people. Multi-surface sprays that fizzed on contact; moisturisers that toned and lifted and lightly tanned; shampoos that thickened and added shine. Daniel and Angelica dreamed of a better world but still baulked at the smell of each other’s shit, necessitating a variety of lavender-based infusions and, when merely masking the odour wouldn’t suffice, a reserve artillery of heavy chemistry that promised nothing short of a bacterial Armageddon. They had stuff for everything. There was a sense of carefully applied science. Their juicer was powerful enough to wring nectar from a breeze block; their bedding gave off scents designed to stimulate sleep. Their vitamin regimen was rigorous and complex. Daniel hadn’t smoked in months. Each morning before work, after an invigorating ylang-ylang-infused shower and a breakfast of carefully selected nutritionally balanced cereals, he threw carrots and apples and oddly shaped multi-ethnic fruits he couldn’t name into the gaping maw of his juicer and knocked back 250 ml of pure unadulterated well-being. Like so much in his life, it was healthily vile, but the sourness was sweetened by virtue: you could boast about it; it made you a better person.

All their friends were couples. Angelica had been in a long-term relationship (her phrase) and her ex had treated her so badly that she’d taken all their friends with her when they split. Daniel had few friends of his own. Her friends were their friends now. At weekends they took it in turns to play host. One couple cooked, the other brought wine. A sense of competition lurked amidst the camaraderie. The plurals were barbed. And we just had such a great time in New York, did you guys go anywhere this year? Or even the supposed simplicity of How are you two? Couldn’t one be up and one be down?

The most common visitors were Sebastian and Plum, who were visiting this particular evening. Plum was Plum’s given name. She had those kinds of parents. Her sister was called Nasturtium. Sebastian, rather ironically, was not Sebastian’s given name at all but simply a name he happened to prefer to what he’d actually been christened: Walter. Sebastian, much to his chagrin, had those kinds of parents. He’d been baptised and, for a while, home schooled, but had shaken it all loose at the age of eighteen by running away to Goa, where he’d undergone a tie-dyed transformation and returned as Sebastian Freud. His parents were outraged, but Sebastian was past parents. He was past a lot of things. Like Angelica, he’d worked through a lot of stuff. He was narcissistically altruistic. He bragged about his selflessness. His soliloquies were two parts arrogance to one part suggestive condescension. He thought Daniel was repressed. Daniel thought he was a prick. They’d tolerated each other during the days of doing good, which Daniel now thought of slightly more clear-sightedly as the days of impressing Angelica, but in the six months following Daniel’s acceptance of a position at the Jenssen-Meyer Centre, which Sebastian happened to be targeting with one of his protests, their ability to pretend to get along had, to say the least, waned.

Daniel was, broadly speaking, honest about his work in The Centre’s PR department, and honest about the work in which The Centre was engaged. What he was not quite honest about was how he had got the job and the moral flexibility he was encouraged to enjoy now that he had it.

Operating in the field of biochemical crop research, the Jenssen-Meyer Centre was run by two of the eighties’ more notable radical humanist biologists: Lens Jenssen and Colin Meyer. Their credentials when it came to life in the trenches of the nascent environmental movement were, as Daniel had grown adept at pointing out, pretty unimpeachable. Given their background, and the fact that the aim of their work was the creation of a sustainable food source, Jenssen and Meyer were understandably upset to find themselves the target of exactly the sort of protest they probably would have been part of twenty years ago, and so, when it came to selecting someone to manage their public statements, were keen to select someone who had what they slightly euphemistically called an understanding of the dreadlocked crusties currently frightening investors by touting banners in the car park. Daniel, who by that stage felt he had, if he was honest, done enough not only to impress Angelica but also to slough off the slash-and-burn anti-ideology of Katherine’s world-view, and who was beginning, much as he’d enjoyed what he would later think of as his gap-months, to tire of Angelica’s idealism and to miss the sense of professional advancement that had formed the bedrock of his life to date, saw an opportunity to balance one half of his life against the other, and so was excited to find himself shortlisted, which went some way to explaining the zeal with which he interviewed.

Jenssen and Meyer were seen as elitist, he told them. Their image had become secretive; self-satisfied. Their shared background in radical biochemistry; their once-alternative lifestyle which they’d always worn as a badge of pride, wasn’t actually cause for admiration at all. The hippies, far from seeing Jenssen and Meyer as kindred spirits made good, saw them as sell-outs. To them, all engagement with the powers-that-be was suspicious. Hippies didn’t want to achieve anything, Daniel said. They wanted to sit in rented halls and recapitulate old arguments, all the while comforting themselves with the notion that their inability to change anything was simply because society was tilted against them. This meant that Jenssen and Meyer had, in the eyes of the demonstrators outside their building, committed a kind of double sin. Not only had they sold out, they’d also accidentally demonstrated that selling out worked, and for that, Daniel said, the hippies were never going to forgive them. He understood that it might have been a point of personal pride to win over people they thought should have been their friends in the first place, but the truth was it was time to make new friends. Rather than selling the ideological integrity of their research to the alternative set, he suggested, they needed to sell the respectability of their research to the respectable set, because at the moment they were falling between two ideologically opposed stools and doing a grand job of pleasing neither. Just as the demonstrators used Jenssen and Meyer’s background as proof they had no loyalty to firm ideals, so the more conservative amongst the research communities used it as evidence of their potential flakiness. In the end, no one cared about the hippies and what they thought. If Jenssen and Meyer wanted to succeed, Daniel said, building to a crescendo, it was time for a clean break. Fuck the hippies.

From here, naturally, he pointed to his well-documented background in the corporate sphere as well as his less-documented background in the hippie sphere and suggested that if they found anyone with a more perfect balance of the particular elements that this role would require someone to juggle they should let him know. They offered him the job on the spot. He sold it to Angelica as a way of genuinely making a difference, and to her credit she’d given him the benefit of the doubt. Sebastian, on the other hand, had not only failed to stop demonstrating but, probably out of sheer spite, had stepped up his efforts, meaning that the façade of friendship they maintained for Angelica’s benefit was now thinner than ever. Nonetheless, every weekend Daniel had to smile his way through dinner, the phrase fuck the hippies sticking rather uncomfortably in his throat.

The evenings were all much of a muchness, and Daniel found them tolerable only in that they spared him having to spend another evening bonding with Angelica. Angelica always cooked – something lumpy and hearty and altogether heinous – and Sebastian and Plum always brought wine – something dry and unusual with impeccable political credentials.

Tonight was, naturally, no different. They arrived late enough to demonstrate their casual disregard for bourgeois punctuality yet not so late as to relinquish the right to get angry if anyone was ever overly behind schedule for one of their own gatherings. Plum was wearing a dress she’d fashioned herself from a collection of period cushion covers sourced, as she explained, from an amazing little charity shop they’d found while holidaying in Brighton. Sebastian was wearing brown boots with heels that were borderline Cuban, stonewashed jeans and a jacket with a Nehru collar. His long hair was tied back in a way that made it look like his smile was caused by tension across his scalp and face.

‘Ange,’ said Sebastian, kissing Angelica on the lips (cheek-kissing was repressed, everyone seemed to agree, and reserved only for uncomfortable or false situations). ‘Great to see you. God, you look fabulous. Doesn’t she look fabulous, Daniel?’

‘Of course,’ said Daniel as Plum kissed him on the cheek. ‘As do you, Plum.’

‘Barium irrigation,’ she said, reaching over to embrace Angelica while Sebastian waved awkwardly at Daniel across the hugging women. ‘I feel like superwoman.’

‘It’s amazing how much crap you can hold in your colon,’ said Angelica.

They seated themselves at the dining table, where Angelica had lit candles. The stereo was playing something Brazilian. Angelica went off to gather the meal.

‘Can I do anything, hon?’ called Daniel.

‘No,’ she called back, much to his disappointment. ‘Just stay and entertain, darling.’

Sebastian smiled. ‘You don’t mind me telling Ange how fabulous she looks, do you?’

‘Of course not,’ said Daniel. ‘How are you, anyway?’

‘Wonderful,’ said Plum.

‘Lots happening,’ said Sebastian.

‘That’s great,’ said Daniel.

‘And how about you?’ said Sebastian, flashing his teeth. ‘How’s life in the lab?’

‘I don’t work in the labs,’ Daniel replied, for perhaps the hundredth time.

‘Oh yes, I always forget. You don’t research, you just proselytise the research.’

‘Oh leave him alone, Seb,’ said Plum.

‘I’m just ribbing him a bit. You don’t mind, do you, Dan?’

Daniel did mind, and also disliked having his name abbreviated, but commented on neither transgression, since to do so would ruin the atmosphere. Angelica set great store by atmosphere, and woe betide anyone who was caught jeopardising it.

‘Well I think proselytising’s a bit strong,’ said Daniel. ‘It’s more a sort of educational capacity, really.’

‘You’re the minister of propaganda then,’ said Sebastian.

‘Not really, no.’

Like many in his circle, Sebastian determinedly equated anything he didn’t like with fascism.

‘You’ve seen the headlines, I assume?’ said Sebastian. ‘God, what am I saying? You probably wrote the headlines.’

‘Which headlines are we talking about?’

‘You know, the ones about The Centre.’

‘Oh, those,’ said Daniel. ‘Yes, we’re not sure where those are coming from, actually.’

‘I assume you’re about to tell me they’re untrue.’

‘Well I wasn’t actually, but since you mention it, yes, they’re totally false.’

‘Spoken like a true believer.’

‘Believing’s got nothing to do with it. The Centre is researching a sustainable crop source. Whatever’s going on with the cows is completely unrelated.’

‘But what if they’ve been eating modified crops? What if this is a glimpse of us in the future?’

‘If you think cows eat crops then you’re incredibly naïve. More to the point, if it’s true that this is a virus that’s capable of jumping the species barrier, which everyone seems to think it is, then that would rule out the food source as the infecting agent.’

‘Not really,’ smiled Sebastian, who hated being called naïve to the exact same degree as he loved labelling others as such. ‘It could be picked up in the food source, then passed to humans when they eat infected meat.’

‘Yes, but that only brings us back to the question of the food source. Don’t you remember Mad Cow? Cows eat mushed-up cows for breakfast, lunch and dinner.’

‘You know,’ said Sebastian, his lip curling. ‘You should work in PR.’

‘And you should spend your life picketing stuff you don’t understand,’ snapped Daniel. ‘Saw you out there the other day. You looked dreadfully cold.’

‘Warm in your office, was it?’

‘Yes thanks.’

‘Long way from that car park now, aren’t you?’

At this, Daniel simply laughed, even if it was only to mask his grimace.

‘We’re not onto this already, are we?’ said Angelica, carrying through the lentil thing and rolling her eyes. ‘I mean for God’s sake, boys, let it go.’

Sebastian spread his hands in a smug, blameless way. Daniel did the same in an equally smug, though slightly less blameless way.

The conversation moved on. Plum and Sebastian talked about Brighton. They always talked about places as if the people to whom they were speaking could never possibly have been there. Daniel had been to Brighton, but didn’t say anything. He’d already flirted with a spell in the doghouse during his exchange with Sebastian. He was usually, he thought, better at managing these occasions. Perhaps it was Katherine’s call, the stirring up of all those unpleasant memories and sensations. Perhaps it was the flu. Either way, he felt decidedly sharp-edged. Katherine would have said this was his true self. As far as she was concerned, conviviality was always a lie. You could fake being nice, she would say, but being a cunt came from the heart.

When Daniel tuned back into the conversation it had turned to politics and failures of government. It never ceased to amaze Daniel that, years after Blair’s departure, his shortcomings remained a fixture of dinner-party conversation. If that wasn’t a legacy, Daniel didn’t know what was.

‘I mean,’ said Sebastian, ‘just look at Afhanistan.’

‘Oh I know,’ said Angelica. ‘Afyanistan is a horror. To think that man actually took us there.’

It was, Daniel noticed, an unspoken agreement within the group that the names of foreign countries had to be pronounced with a slightly different inflection than was usual, delivered with such confidence that it implied ignorance on the part of anyone oafish and colonialist enough to say Afghanistan.

‘You know,’ said Sebastian, leaning forward in the manner that always presaged his saying something intense. ‘The Native Americans have this really fascinating approach to the whole concept of leadership.’

‘Oh I love their outlook on things,’ said Angelica. ‘Like their system of non-ownership and their whole attitude to the land? It’s so awful that we just crush these cultures without learning from them first.’

‘It’s true,’ said Daniel. ‘We should learn then crush.’

‘Oh you know what I mean. Don’t be pedantic.’

‘What they say,’ said Sebastian, quickly heading off any possible sidetracking, ‘is OK, you can be our leader, you can be our chief or whatever, but only until you start behaving like our leader. You see?’

‘Mmmm,’ said Plum. ‘God, that’s so beautiful.’

‘Mmmm,’ said Angelica.

‘Because what they’re saying,’ said Sebastian, ‘is that power corrupts, right? It’s like the … the inevitability of fascism.’ He clapped his hands once, quickly, clearly pleased with the phrase. ‘And the second they spot that you’re going over to the dark side …’ He drew a finger across his neck. ‘You’re finished.’

‘So who makes that decision?’ said Daniel. ‘I mean, is there a sort of matrix of warning signs or something? What are the key indicators? Buying a Porsche?’

‘I think that’s a very materialist way of looking at what is essentially a spiritual matter.’

‘Well I think the whole thing’s a very spiritual way of looking at what is essentially a practical matter. Don’t you want your leaders to behave like leaders? Don’t you want them to take responsibility?’

‘Mmhmm,’ nodded Sebastian. ‘But there’s the issue of the common good.’

‘Who decides that?’

‘Daniel’s a bit grumpy today,’ said Angelica, rubbing his back and pouting. ‘He’s had an ickle bit of fwoo.’

‘Oh fuck off.’

‘You’d be right out of the Native American leadership circle with that sort of behaviour,’ said Plum, winking at Daniel. She had a way of somehow joining in with the general conversational trend while at the same time suggesting a degree of sympathy with the underdog, meaning no one could ever justifiably get angry with her, meaning in turn that Daniel quickly became angry with her but had no idea how to express it without looking like an arsehole.

‘Illness is such a blessing,’ said Sebastian, helping himself to some more of the lentil thing. ‘It’s so cleansing.’

‘I’m full of snot. I don’t feel cleansed.’

‘Gwumpy wumpy,’ said Angelica, reaching down to pick up the cat, groaning a little as she heaved its formless mass onto her lap. ‘He’s gwumpy, isn’t he? Yes he is. Yes he is.’

‘I remember when I had dysentery in Sri Lanka,’ said Plum. ‘God, it was like being a new person at the end of it.’

Sebastian put his arm round her and kissed her temple. ‘You were so beautiful going through that,’ he said.

‘Gwumpy man. Gwumpy wumpy daddy man. Yes he is. Yes he is.’

‘Do you have to talk to the cat about me in that way? I mean really? Is it really necessary?’

‘Animals know our true selves,’ said Sebastian. ‘If you’re comfortable with your true self you have nothing to fear from the cat, regardless of what Angelica says to it.’

‘I’m not that concerned about the cat’s opinion, actually, it’s more the …’

‘I sometimes feel like he looks right through me,’ said Angelica, looking at Daniel but ostensibly referring to the cat. ‘Like he can just walk into the room and know, you know? Like the other day when I was feeling really negative, you remember, honey, over that whole thing with the phone and the … anyway, that’s irrelevant, I don’t want to go back to that space again, but he just walked into the room, and looked at me, and I just felt he understood, and he came and sat with me, and it was so calming, and I thought, all of this is happening without language, without words.’

‘It’s true,’ said Daniel. ‘He knows the pain of being mischarged on your quarterly BT bill.’

‘It’s not that literal,’ said Sebastian.

‘I know. I was sort of joking.’

Sebastian nodded as if this confirmed something very important to him. It was one of the things that Daniel had never quite understood about Sebastian and Plum and their ilk. For people who believed in freedom and expression and peace and love, who railed daily against the tyranny of the squares, they were oddly humourless, as if free expression and boundless emotional exploration were such a serious business that they left no room for actual fun.

‘Who wants more?’ said Angelica, pouring the cat onto the floor as she stood up to attend to the food. ‘Honestly, there’s loads.’

‘I couldn’t,’ said Plum. ‘Really.’

‘Not for me,’ said Daniel. ‘Lovely as it was. I’m stuffed.’

‘Looks like it’s just you and me, Seb. Go on, have another spoonful.’

‘Absolutely don’t mind if I do,’ said Sebastian, passing his plate over. ‘You must give me the recipe.’

‘I’m so blessed to have a man who cooks,’ said Plum.

‘Oh, you are,’ said Angelica. ‘Daniel’s a bloody disaster area in the kitchen.’

‘How can you eat something if you don’t have a relationship with it?’ said Sebastian, dry-swallowing another wad of brownish paste.

‘Mmmm,’ said Angelica.

Daniel said nothing. The difficulty of these little soirées with Sebastian and Plum was that they had a tendency to cast Daniel as the negative one, the one who blew the vibe all too easily. This meant that he not only had to tolerate them but also had to out-positive them, which of course was difficult when he felt he was about to gag.

He decided to quarantine himself quickly, before all the sewage inside him escaped.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m not well. I might need to lie down.’

‘Really, honey?’ said Angelica. ‘Are you really feeling rotten and miserable?’

‘Yes,’ said Daniel. ‘Sorry.’

‘Maybe we should go,’ said Plum.

‘No, no,’ protested Daniel, noting that Sebastian had remained silent through this exchange. ‘Don’t mind me. You stay and have a good time. I might even come back down. I just need a bit of a rest, that’s all.’

‘Feel better soon,’ advised Plum.

As he climbed the stairs, already regretting what must have seemed a sudden and rather pathetic exit, he could hear Sebastian taking up the theme.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘the Bhutanese believe that how someone handles illness says a lot about how they handle life …’

He lay down on the bed, fully clothed, and closed his eyes. The lentils were repeating. He felt weighed down, awkwardly anchored to the world around him. His brain was somehow racing and limping at the same time.

He was, he thought, slightly self-indulgently but with a certain amount of satisfaction, troubled. He recognised this because it wasn’t a new phenomenon. Just as spots of blood will point to guilt or illness (the scarlet smear on the handkerchief; the pink streamers of sinister matter in the urine), so Daniel’s thoughts were increasingly spattered with ugly spots of troubling disturbance. Childhood transgressions bubbled to the surface. Old crimes and embarrassing social stumbles pricked at him from the darker recesses of his memory. At perfectly ordinary moments he found his ears burning, his cheeks flushed, his stomach twisting down towards his bowels at the memory of mistakes gone by. Did he think he was perfect? Did he wish he was perfect?

Recently, as if he had unconsciously exhausted his archive of slight yet resilient pains, the memories had begun to be accompanied by sudden, pressing fears. What if Angelica became ill? What if he became ill? What if he lost his job? Perhaps Angelica didn’t love him. Perhaps she had met someone else. How would he be able to tell? How could he tell if he loved her? Like the memories, these fears loomed seemingly from nowhere, from the depths or the peripheral distance, like fish nipping at breadcrumbs on the surface of their calm pool. He wondered if it was because, as he had thought before, he was evaporating as he aged. Perhaps as all the fluids of his self drifted skywards, the things he’d long since drowned returned to the surface. He pictured those selfsame fish – beached, gills gaping, scales already losing their luminescence in the suffocating air. Was this what he was? Was this what everyone was, in the end, a collection of buried, ignored, suppressed detritus that remained stubbornly on the tideline after everything else had receded?

Thinking about it now, in bed, with his hand over his eyes and a childish tremble in his upper lip, he realised that this was why Katherine’s call had unnerved him so thoroughly. Here, at the sight of a single name scrolling across a screen, was the feeling of everything he’d buried being exhumed without dignity. Yes, he had let Nathan down towards the end, of course he had, they all had. Yes, he had cut Katherine off in a manner unbefitting their five years together, giving her the sense, as she had said in her last letter to him just under a year ago, that none of it had mattered, that it had all been a mistake. And yes, most of all, he had lied to Katherine, had cheated on her in no uncertain terms. This was the crux of it. This was what troubled him, and this, if he was honest, was the main contributing factor in his unease around Angelica: the fact that he had, although he had never discussed it, walked out of the bar the night he’d met her, after all those epic, idealistic conversations, feeling what he knew to be the first stirrings of something he’d long thought lost to him, and gone home, to Katherine, with whom he had not yet parted, and told her, just as he had this very evening told Angelica in an uncomfortably similar way, that he had spoken to ‘no one’ the whole evening. And yes, he had called Angelica when Katherine was at work the next day, and yes, he had in fact fucked Angelica some weeks later, still without having ended things with Katherine, and when Katherine had asked if there was anyone else, that night, when it had all come to an end, he’d told her, with a straight face, that he would never do that to anyone, that he didn’t believe in it, and yes, that had been when Katherine had told him, as if she knew (did she know?) never to say never, and had indeed uttered the words that still haunted him now, as he lied and pretended and hid his self-disgust behind disgust at the shortcomings of others: the higher the horse, the harder the fall.