Idiopathy. Sam Byers
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