by Byers, Sam
But of course, there had been that conversation, the last time she’d seen him, which she had not discussed with Daniel, but which she had also not forgotten, and this was, if nothing else, one of those times when being around someone who had a history of finding you attractive would be no bad thing at all.
Claire Demoines had the office in thrall. She’d been to dinner with Keith. Keith had twanged his rubber band. He said he’d never imagined, after the awful techniques of aversion instilled in him by his therapist, that anyone could ever make him think about sex again, but somehow …
‘His restraint was amazing,’ said Claire, running a hand down the herringboned lace of her tights. ‘He said he admired me too much to hurt me like he’d hurt all the other women in his life.’
‘God,’ said Debbie. ‘What a man.’
Keen to once again reaffirm her faith in the basic shittiness of humankind, Katherine took herself off to her local strip club and sat sipping a daiquiri amidst the leering, boozed-out stares of AWOL men. Despite using the word ‘executive’ on its membership cards, its posters, even its drinks coasters, L’Après-Vie represented the cheaper end of male entertainment. The girls were foreign and got all the way naked. Private dances took place in clammy rooms that had, as Dawn would have said, dirty notes. Katherine wondered as to the etymology of all this: the precise moment in man’s history when the definition of eroticism had been agreed to include a skinny, sad-eyed tween in cheap heels launching herself off a piece of re-purposed scaffolding. She paid twenty quid for a private dance with a girl named Clover, who had pigtails and purple nails and a tattoo of a unicorn just above her groin.
‘It’s my power animal,’ she said.
‘I’m pregnant,’ said Katherine.
‘Congratulations,’ said Clover.
Outside, shifty, awkward men queuing for their entertainment eyed her as she left. She felt no vulnerability. She walked home alone through dim-lit streets; crossed the car park under the flyover that she habitually avoided. She wondered idly about rape. It was as if every fuck and kiss, every lingering gaze and hot-breathed whisper, were deserting her, and as she paused in the gloom and spread her hands over the chilly bricks, assuming the stance of someone about to be frisked while she wondered momentarily if she might vomit or sob or both, she felt, rising up from the soles of her feet and leaving through the semi-permeable border of her skin, the evaporation of every intimacy she’d ever known.
She went home and googled porn, only to find she could no longer look at men. She settled for body parts only, happily disembodied and algorithmically collaged. She couldn’t come. Afterwards she called three or four men whose numbers she had stored in her mobile, keeping an open line as the call went to voicemail; pacing the room with her phone in her pocket to give the impression of an accidental dial. She wanted to see if anyone called her back, at which point she would explain the mistake and say it was nice to hear from them anyway. She fell asleep holding a silent phone, and in the morning, when it did ring, it was a woman’s voice.
‘I have Daniel Bryce on the line,’ said the voice. ‘Please hold one moment.’
Katherine held. He seemed to wait a long time before he came on the line.
‘Katherine?’
Her thrill at the sound of his voice was old; almost threadbare. She had, she now realised, spent long stretches of time she would never be able to recoup imagining all the ways he might say hello: the calm; the nervous; the faintly sad; the falsely bright; the careworn; the compassionate; the cocky. She’d imagined all her possible responses: bright and breezy through to nonplussed. She’d wanted this, and now it was here all she could think was that the wanting was a weakness, and all she could feel was the remote and grey-edged disappointment you might experience as you left a party and walked to your car and realised that from outside the music and chatter sounded all the brighter for being muffled, all the more enticing for being far away, leaving you wishing you’d had a better time while you were inside and had the chance.
‘Daniel,’ she said.
She’d done the wanting, wasted herself on it, and now it was over, and necessity stood in its place. If she spoke to him now, this second, she thought, he would know how weak she could be.
‘It’s, um … It’s a bad line,’ she said. ‘Let me call you back.’
‘It seems …’
She hung up, then sat down on the floor and pressed at the sides of her head with her palms and asked herself why, for once, she couldn’t just accept what she wanted and be glad, instead of pushing it away and then waiting for it to return.
It was OK, she told herself. In a couple of minutes she would call him back. Just as soon as she’d been able to convince herself she didn’t care.
‘Love you darling. Could you pass the milk?’
‘Course I can baby. Here you go. Love you.’
‘Love you too.’
They had, Daniel thought, crossed all accepted boundaries of decency.
‘And the juice?’
‘Sorry baby.’
‘Thanks sweetie.’
‘My pleasure sugar.’
They munched their cereal. Daniel fretted over the headlines; Angelica pored over a paperback called The Self-Help Habit: How to Put Down the Books and Get on with Your Life. After a while, she looked up at him and smiled.
‘Love you,’ she said quietly.
‘Love you too,’ said Daniel. ‘More muesli?’
Asked how it had come to this, Daniel’s explanation would, he knew, have differed quite noticeably from Angelica’s. Angelica would have called it a breakthrough. She not only would say but in fact had said, to Sebastian and Plum and one of their sallow-faced right-on friends, that it was like a new relationship. Not that there was anything wrong with the previous relationship, of course, but as everyone knew, a relationship was only as good as its growth, and this was major growth.
Daniel wished this were true. Not in an idle, wouldn’t-world-peace-be-a-wonderful-thing sort of way, but in a concrete and decidedly pained way. He wished it were true not just for Angelica’s sake but also for his own, because if Angelica’s explanation was true, it would mean that his explanation was false, which would mean he really was the brave, generous, emotionally open and fearlessly loving person Angelica thought him to be, and not at all what he knew himself to be: a cynical, scared, duplicitous shit.
It would have been easy to say that things had begun to unravel with Katherine’s phone call. Indeed, it would have been so easy to say this that Daniel had, for some time, toyed with the idea of actually saying it: of arranging Angelica on the scatter cushions one evening and telling her that Katherine had called and explaining to her in slow, even, unchallenging tones, that this had stirred up a lot of shit for him, and that he needed some time to process it, and that Angelica mustn’t worry, because this wasn’t about her, it was about him, and he was absolutely certain he would deal with it and all would be well. This would have been the mature response and would, he knew, have been greatly appreciated by Angelica, who would have at least admired its honesty. The problem, though, was that it wouldn’t have been honest at all. Up to the part about stirring shit up, it was pretty accurate, but after that it was essentially a patina of falsehood. Daniel wasn’t at all confident he could deal with it, and he was twitchingly uncertain that this didn’t have anything to do with Angelica. Dishonest as Daniel may have been, even he flinched at the prospect of accruing spiritual and romantic brownie points by pretending to be honest. Lying was one thing, but lying in such a way as to find yourself being praised for your honesty was, he thought, entirely another.
A better approach would have been to say nothing, a technique in which Daniel was well versed, and which had served him quite reliably when coupled with his other favoured strategy of carrying on as normal. Daniel was, or so he liked to believe, very good at carrying on as normal. He knew this because he’d carried on as normal through some distinctly un-normal times, such as the latter stages of his
relationship with Katherine; his affair; even Nathan’s odd behaviour and eventual disappearance. Why not, he thought, carry on as normal now?
The difficulty, which had become apparent the moment he descended the stairs and used the expression Wrong Number to Angelica, who had believed him so immediately and with such absence of hesitation that he instantly felt staggeringly guilty, was that he could no longer be entirely sure what normal was.
He peered over the top of the paper and studied Angelica as she studied her book. She caught his eye and shot him a little smile, then mouthed something that was indistinct due to having some muesli in her mouth, but which, going out on a limb, he took to be ‘I love you.’ He mouthed the same back at her and smiled. She smiled back.
‘God, this cull,’ he said.
‘Isn’t it awful? Those poor cows.’
Daniel hadn’t actually considered the cows. His mind had been on more work-based concerns, such as the potential for a PR apocalypse. But then Angelica was one of those people, the sort who, walking through the city and passing a bedraggled vagabond flanked by neckerchiefed Labradors, would say simply, Oh, those poor dogs.
‘I know,’ he said.
‘Do you?’ said Angelica, looking up suddenly from her book, her eyes full.
Daniel froze for a moment. Did he? Did he know?
‘Um … Yes,’ he said.
‘Oh Daniel,’ she said, breathing out and beaming. ‘I love you so much.’
‘Me too,’ he said.
He kept experiencing these little freezes: rude sensations of being locked out of his own existence, just for a second. He seemed to come to, though from what he was never sure, to find reality had advanced a beat without him. He was more aware of them now because it was precisely one of these fleeting moments of existential paralysis that had got him into the current thorny predicament with reference to his apparent inability to stop telling Angelica he loved her.
He’d awoken early, the morning after Katherine phoned, and briefly congratulated himself on his handling of the night before. Her call had thrown him, but he felt he’d recovered reasonably well. Angelica hadn’t suspected anything; he’d been only moderately offensive in the face of Sebastian’s highly offensive presence; his early trudge to bed had surely been successfully masked by his man flu; and he’d acquitted himself more than tolerably in the sack before nodding off. It was while considering these achievements that he became aware that his head had rolled in Angelica’s direction and, worse, that she had woken up and was staring back at him with that particular sentimental intensity that always made him feel as if someone had just daubed his skin with tiger balm. When he brought her into focus, he found she was smiling.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.
It was a good question. What was he thinking? He realised he needed to think of any random subject in the world – football; the news; work; his dreams – and that would end the conversation, but his brain was suddenly bereft of resources, and when he tried to think he heard only the sort of cavernous echo that might accompany a bucket dropped into an empty well. What was he thinking? What was he thinking?
‘Err … I love you,’ he said, politely ignoring the air-raid siren in his brain.
She beamed. ‘Love you too,’ she said, throwing her arms around him and hugging him until he perspired.
The damage was done. Now every time he looked at her he felt she was looking at him in anticipation of him telling her he loved her, meaning every time he didn’t tell her he loved her he felt like exactly the sort of shit he should have felt like every time he did tell her he loved her. Somehow, not telling her he loved her had become synonymous with telling her he didn’t love her, meaning he had to tell her he loved her just to maintain the status quo.
He glanced again at his newspaper. Some cretin in the op-ed section was going all weak-kneed about animal rights. Daniel imagined him, the columnist, bravely mopping the tears from his keyboard as he typed on. Sebastian would be all over this, he thought grimly. When had normality become so bloody weird?
He gathered his newspaper and stood up.
‘Just going to brush my teeth,’ he said, tucking the newspaper under his arm. ‘Won’t be long.’
It was a daily euphemism. Neither of them ever announced they were going for a shit. They were forever cleaning their teeth or washing their faces. For some reason they both always said they wouldn’t be long.
He thought about Katherine as he drove to work, or rather, he thought around her, tending as he did to back his way into any reverie in which she might be involved. He’d been turning the telephone message over in his mind for a couple of days, and in between telling Angelica he loved her he’d made a concerted effort to at least begin to diagnose his feelings. Sadly, he’d made little headway, and his sense of how he thought he might be feeling differed depending on his sense of how he thought he might be living, which recently had been fluctuating on a near-daily basis, tied up as it was in Daniel’s difficult and shifting relationship to what he thought of as Normality.
His relationship with Katherine had, categorically, not been normal, and now he’d left it and was in a relationship where normal things were very definitely said and done, it was fairly easy for him to think of himself and his life as normal. After all, he thought, here he was: he’d told his girlfriend he loved her; she’d told him she loved him; he’d eaten breakfast; and was now driving to a successful job. That was normal, wasn’t it? If it was, then Katherine’s phone call had to be regarded as some sort of brutal intrusion of abnormality.
Viewed another way, though, it was also possible for Daniel to reverse the situation. No, his relationship with Katherine had not been normal. It had been jagged and unpleasant. But there was, nonetheless, a creeping and rather disturbing sense of late that although the relationship might not have been as he wished it to be, Daniel had in fact been more himself. After all, he thought, was it really normal to feel so emotionally shifty around your partner? If everything was so sodding normal then why had Katherine’s phone call sent him into a state of such disrepair? Worryingly, distastefully, when Daniel looked at things this way he started to view the phone call as a sort of relief, which made him more scared than when he simply regarded it as something scary.
He remembered lying in bed beside Katherine, not just in the later stages but, if he was honest, through much of their relationship, and trying to assess her level of anger by the way that she breathed as she slept, the way she rolled, the sounds she made as she stirred. He tended to wake before her, and found he could tell if she was angry before she even woke up. She was the only person he’d ever met who slept angrily. All it would take would be one sniff, one jerk of the shoulders as she rolled, and he’d know, and then he’d be tense, and she’d wake up and see he was tense and get angry. Or so she’d claim. As far as Daniel was concerned the truth was that nothing made Katherine angry. Her anger was organic. It simply was.
It was also infectious. Nothing had ever made Daniel angry like Katherine’s anger. It flowed straight into his system. Other people had passing flare-ups, but Katherine could sustain the narrative of her rage for alarming periods of time. It would go through discernible shifts in tone. It had plot twists. Sometimes she apologised, even smiled, only to unleash another assault when he weakened. Sometimes she held off for days, edging him this way and that across a range of media: phone calls, emails at work, texts, even notes that she stuck to the fridge. Don’t make any effort, said one. I’m really sorry you’ve taken this so badly, said another. Once, she’d called him at work and told him in a voice so reasoned it was actually dispassionate that she accepted full responsibility for the argument.
‘Really?’ he’d said cautiously.
‘Yes. It’s my fault.’
‘Well …’
‘You’re not up to this. It’s not your fault. I just forgot it, that’s all.’
‘Not up to what?’
‘It’s really not your fault.’
&nbs
p; ‘What’s not my fault?’
‘Anything.’
He was quiet for several seconds, cogitating. He could hear her waiting.