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
