of my left hand. I turn my hands over. The years of crutching about have calloused my palms: they’re as thick as soles. The kettle shakes as it comes to the boil, and so does the face in it. I think of those pop statistics that people trot out without checking the maths: if you live to be seventy, you will have spent twenty-three years sleeping, seven driving, three shaving, seven having a dump, and so on and so forth. I am thirty-nine and a quarter; how much time have I spent waiting for kettles to boil? How much time do I have left to wait for kettles to boil? Because I always wait. I’ve learnt that if I wander off I’ll find something to do in the meantime, become distracted and only remember much later that I’d been trying to make coffee. By then, the kettle will be cold, and the milk in the mug gone strange, and I’ll have to start all over again.
I’ve learnt other useful things as well over the years.
That instant coffee tastes better if you put the milk in before the water. That the slow lane moves quicker than the fast in morning traffic to town. That if you crimp your fingers inwards when chopping a carrot – just like so – you won’t slice off their tips by mistake.
I take my coffee to my study – well, I squeak-thunk there, deposit a crutch, squeak-hop back to the kitchen, drink off the spillable portion, squeak-hop to my desk. Where I Google and write down the numbers of pest-control people who might want to come and make the squirrels go away. I learn two more useful things doing this. Firstly, that squirrels are a protected species, and as they may not be poisoned most pest controllers want nothing to do with them; and secondly, that because today is New Year’s Eve, it takes twelve calls before one guy answers his phone – then tells me he’s driving up the coast, won’t be back for three weeks.
Between the Googling and the documenting of squirrel people, after checking the news sites and my share prices, I find myself with nothing really to do. I suppose the word is “bored”, but. I’ve been bored for a while, I realise – or imagine – but it’s more than that. There’s a tugging in me, but I don’t know what’s doing the tugging or where it’s trying to tug me to. It’s attached to my abdomen, to the lower region of my stomach, my navel perhaps, and it feels like that moment when you’ve just woken up to a recollection of something awful and for a minute or so you’re not awake enough to identify it. But now there’s no revelation, no resurgence of memory to decode the feeling, and it remains, not quite gut-ache, not quite nausea, just a quiet nagging.
So I poke around Google, sipping coffee that’s cooling and beginning to grow a grey scum over itself. There are apparently a billion web pages out there; something, surely, must be worth its pixels.
But no.
Perhaps the holidays have gone on too long. I can only watch Tracy paint her toenails so many times before I know it’s time to get back to the office. I’m not sure what to Google so I type in “what’s tugging at me” and get 12,600,000 results in an instant. They contain links to religious tracts, solipsistic blogs, New Age waffle, porn sites. I guess you could type anything into Google, say, “Indonesian macroeconomics in the nineteenth century”, and it’ll turn up at least three porn sites. But none of the results – or at least none of the dozens I look at – can answer my question. So I Google myself and find that it turns up 15,300,000 results. After twelve pages, not one of them is me. I suppose I’m not the only Chris Hayes on the wired planet.
I hear a noise, a thumping on wood, too big for a squirrel, followed by a muttered curse. Schultz twitches in his sleep: it has to be Gabriel, sixteen and six foot tall, all arms and legs and size eleven feet, the everything of him connected by bones and skin and not much else. He has been overwhelmed by teenaged clumsiness and yet insists on going up and down our ridiculous stairs in his socks. The noise tells me that he didn’t clear the last three on the way down.
“Gabriel, don’t say ‘fuck’ please,” I call.
“I’m fine thanks, Dad,” he says. “And I didn’t say ‘fuck’. I said ‘that sucks’.”
Gabriel’s dyslexia is so bad that half the time he probably can’t tell whether the steps are going up or down. He’s struggled ever since the other kids in the class were reading “cat” and “hat”. Often, people think he’s stupid, which he isn’t, and I’ve told him to allow his intelligence to be his secret weapon, but he hasn’t got the hang of that either.
I can hear him starting to make coffee – should sixteen-year-olds drink coffee? I don’t know; I’ll Google it some time. I find myself waiting for the crash of a dropped mug, but it doesn’t happen.
I’m on page thirteen of the Google results for Chris Hayes and still none of them are about me. Besides the Waspy locations where you’d expect to find people with the same name as mine, there are Chris Hayeses living in Shanghai, in Nairobi, in Lima. Some are property developers, others musicians or teachers or freelance chauffeurs. One, like me but not me, is a partner in an architectural firm. He’s based in Dubai; but what if Dubai was code for a parallel universe – would expat Chris Hayes have a teenaged son too, a wife who becomes blonder and skinnier as time goes by? Would he also have a missing leg, and if so would it be the right one and not the left, because surely a parallel universe would be a mirror of this one? I imagine a snapshot of him and his family with the Burj al Arab or the Yacht Club or the streets of Jumeirah in the background, his Hayes family’s faces on backwards and his Tracy’s beauty spot on her right cheek instead of her left. Even the Arabic writing behind them would only make sense if read from the left, and that only if you could read Arabic.
This non-finding of myself is becoming tedious, so on a whim I decide to Google Kathy Whatshername. I haven’t thought of her for years: we copulated frantically, manically, during the summer holidays when I was twenty-one and she was twenty-six. Once I start doing the maths it all seems to be a very long time ago, so I stop. It takes a while to remember her surname and when I do remember, Google turns up 4,880,000 results, but the first ten pages aren’t her. For a while Tracy tried to get me onto Facebook, and maybe I should, but then she’ll have to be my friend and she’ll see the weird people I might dig up out of the past, which is all Facebook seems to be good for, and then I’ll have to explain myself. Not that there would be a lot to explain. I only Google Kathy because of an impulse that hits me like a small stroke, unwanted and unexpected. I don’t want to hook up with her or even speak to her. I just want to see if she looks like the face in the kettle yet.
Gabriel sticks his head into my study.
“Morning, Dad,” he says over my shoulder. Sometimes he greets me, sometimes he doesn’t.
“Hi, Gabe,” I say.
“Who is Kathy Simons?” he asks. I really need to turn my desk around. I’ve been meaning to ever since we moved in: I can’t stand my back to a room, mostly because of what Gabriel’s just done.
“New employee, and none of your business,” I say, hiding the browser window, which makes me look guilty – of what I don’t know, but guilty anyway.
I turn around to look at the ironing board that is my son. Streaks of coffee decorate the outside of his mug.
“How are you, Gabe?” I ask.
“Fine.”
Everything’s fine with him. How’s school? Fine. How was your test? Fine. How’s the weather, your new shoes? Fine, fine. How do you like being ravaged by hormones and confusion, what’s it like falling down the stairs twice a day, how do you feel about the fact that you may die a long and painful death from a dread disease one day? Fine, fine, fine. What’s not fine is the sorry kid’s face with its furious pizza-textured rash that nature has inflicted on him precisely when he is least equipped to deal with it. It makes
