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
